Top 131 Holocaust Quotes

Because of my experience with the Holocaust, I don’t like to lose friends.

The Holocaust changed our perception of morality not only because we discovered that morality is the only thing that can stand up to the ultimate evil, but also because it shifted the focus from society to the individual.

I don’t want to close the door that if any of us were president of the United States that we would sit idly by and watch something like the Holocaust go down. I don’t want to close the door on the United States involving themselves and putting a stop to that. Can we spend money on that? Yeah, I think so.

I will never agree with statements that Poles as a nation participated in the Holocaust or Poland participated in the Holocaust. It humiliates us and hurts us.

Looking at the numbers, the transatlantic slave trade matches the Holocaust in horror – maybe even without counting subsidiary effects like internal strife and deaths inflected on the continent, death during transport, death during ownership, collapse of African economies, and such.

It’s in the history books, the Holocaust. It’s just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.

Trivializing the Holocaust is the last thing I want to do.

The unutterable violence of the Holocaust shook our confidence in the possibility of telling any story of faith at all.

I’ve read pretty broadly on the Holocaust – both fiction and non-fiction – and to me, ‘The Lost Wife‘ is one of the best. The horrors of war serve as a backdrop to a love affair that spans a lifetime, and that love story stayed with me long after I put down the book.

By the time I’m 50, there is probably going to be a nuclear holocaust. I should just enjoy myself.

To me, the Holocaust stands alone as the most horrible human event in modern civilization.

My mother and father had been through the Holocaust. The family was wiped out. I grew up never knowing aunts, uncles, or grandparents.

Since the Holocaust, anti-Semitism is no longer respectable. It was in the 1920s and ’30s, but the Holocaust obviously changed that.

We cannot calculate the numbers of people who left, fled or were fished out of Europe just ahead of the Holocaust.

The obligation to remember is inscribed on every Holocaust memorial, but even the words ‘Never Forget’ become irksome eventually.

Without the railways, the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened. I don’t actually think the second world war would have happened without them.

Hollywood would make a holocaust an animated comedy if people would pay to see it; they don’t care… they just want your money.

You can’t portray wartime Shanghai without writing about the Holocaust – about 25,000 Jews survived the Nazi death machine by taking refuge there.

We in the United States should be all the more thankful for the freedom and religious tolerance we enjoy. And we should always remember the lessons learned from the Holocaust, in hopes we stay vigilant against such inhumanity now and in the future.

If I’d been living in Berlin in 1933-34, could I possibly have foreseen the Holocaust and all the corollary horrors of World War II? And if I had, would I have done anything about it? I also started to wonder: how does a culture slip its moorings?

I am not saying that factory farming is the same as the Holocaust or the slave trade, but it’s clear that there is an immense amount of suffering in it, and just as we think that the Nazis were wrong to ignore the suffering of their victims, so we are wrong to ignore the sufferings of our victims.

We strongly condemn all forms of anti-Semitism as well as any form of downplaying or denial of the Holocaust.

When the Holocaust happened, I was 15 years old. My parents kept it a secret from me, despite belonging to the Red Cross. I only found out about it much later. Even today I still feel guilty, because I was an ignoramus between the age of 15 and 25. I am sorry I couldn’t stand up for them.

I always, always have the Holocaust on my mind.

As I was growing up, you know, I’m a white Jewish American born to Holocaust parents. My father fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and my mother’s family had fled the czars of Russia before that.

People in the West tend to identify with western victims. So even when they think about the Holocaust, they really think about the German or French victims; they’re not thinking about the Polish, Hungarian, or Soviet victims.

We’ve seen the worst that human beings are capable of. We’ve seen what happens when leaders abandon common decency in favor of rage and hate. Through the lens of history, the Holocaust happened yesterday, the civil rights movement was this morning, so we are not as out of the woods as we might have thought.

I’ve met many Holocaust survivors who find the era infinitely compelling because they have this deep hunger to understand how it all could possibly have happened.

People are feeling and sensing a return of anti-Semitism – even in Europe, which, seventy years after the Holocaust, is a very scary thing. I think they are feeling that Israel is very isolated and doesn’t always get what they see as fair treatment in the European media.

The only way you can handle big kinds of questions is to simply state briefly what the truth was. What am I going to tell you about the Holocaust? Would you like three pages about it? I don’t think you would… I don’t think anything different than you think – it was horrible.

There’s nothing better than to be rootless cosmopolitans who seamlessly merge into whatever society. That’s the greatest thing human beings can aspire to. Whether forced by duress, Jews became perfect modern human beings. After the Holocaust, one doesn’t really mourn for that – it’s too disturbing, seems like a mistake.

I believe, and I have always believed, that these events on the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day should take place in Auschwitz and that this is the most important place to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust.

The slogan ‘Never Again!’ that emerged after the Holocaust implies that the Holocaust has a universal moral meaning, which, if properly learned, can provide at least a theoretical prophylactic against its repetition against anyone.

The search for a Jewish national home came about due to centuries of anti-Semitic pogroms, expulsions, discrimination and hate. The Holocaust was simply the evil culmination of all that came before it.

Must we wait for selection to solve the problems of overpopulation, exhaustion of resources, pollution of the environment and a nuclear holocaust, or can we take explicit steps to make our future more secure? In the latter case, must we not transcend selection?

Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington.

My father’s family was mostly obliterated in the Holocaust, and I grew up very much with the sense that the central moral and political question is how do we prevent these things from happening again.

Larry David finds a way to make jokes about the Holocaust. It would never have occurred to me. And it was funny.

My grandparents got out of Poland right before the Holocaust and came here, and the only thing that mattered was surviving.

I’m of that generation of Jews still deeply influenced by the Holocaust. Certainly the notion that the state power to kill can be subject to such extraordinary abuse is always lurking beneath the surface for me. Certainly my experience and identity as a Jew is there.

The building in the Bronx where I grew up was filled with mostly Holocaust survivors. My two best friends’ parents both survived the camps. Everyone in my grandparents’ building had tattoos. I’d go shopping with my grandparents, and the butcher, the baker, everybody in the whole neighborhood had tattoos.

Arab youth are taught to wonder, ‘Since the Holocaust was a European affair, why are the Palestinians being forced to pay for the creation of Israel?’

I have a little hope that the nuclear holocaust doesn’t happen.

There are Jews who were born in Poland before World War II and survived the Holocaust, who think Poland and the Poles deserve an apology.

I believe that the Holocaust is the most significant event in human history.

I heard about the Holocaust before hearing the ‘Cinderella‘ story or watching ‘Peter Pan.’

In my experience, the men of World War II, the vets of Vietnam, even guys coming back from Iraq, are loath to talk about their experiences. And the survivors of the Holocaust, particularly, are often very close-mouthed about their stories, even to their own children.

There must be people who remember World War II and the Holocaust who can help us get out of this rut.

When I was in college, my school newspaper accepted an ad from a Holocaust revisionist organization. This would have been offensive on most college campuses across the country, but I went to a school with a very large Jewish population, so the ad, as you might expect, stirred absolute outrage.

From 1983 to 2000, William Goren stole more than $30 million from investors on Long Island and in Queens. His favorite targets were widows and retired couples, like Helga and Simon Novack, Holocaust survivors who gave Mr. Goren their life savings.

How do you talk about the Holocaust? How do you talk about slavery? Probably the best thing to do is just be quiet and hide from it, forget about it. Except, then it jumps up and bites you. Because it’s there.

I have not changed my opinion that the Holocaust is a trauma of European civilization.

Growing up, I heard a lot about strength. My dad – a Holocaust survivor – embodied it, though he would never say that about himself. Not only did he survive one of the most horrific events in history, but he never lost hope along the way, crediting acts of kindness with keeping him alive.

It took me fifty years to deal with the Holocaust at all. And I did it in a literary way.

Holocaust films will be made and should be made as long as we can’t understand what makes people so cruel to each other.

Every two, three years there is a movie about the Holocaust because they want you to remember and they want you to be reminded of what it was. When was the last time you seen a movie about slavery?

My father served as an Army doctor in West Germany in the late ’50s and early ’60s. As a result, he and my mother – both native southerners – were acutely aware of what had happened during the Holocaust.

The whole Indian thing, I always say it’s really the American holocaust. It’s something we need to look at.

The Holocaust remains unique in contemporary Jewish consciousness for its capacity to engender the most visceral grief and abject pain.

Like the assassination of JFK, everybody alive then can remember where they were that Doomsday Week of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. That Saturday, 27 October, was, and remains, the closest the world has come to nuclear holocaust – the blackest day of a horrendous week.

My father is sure that Israel keeps the Holocaust from happening again. I worry that it might hasten its recurrence.

Modernity has been largely shaped for Jews by three momentous experiences: the acquisition of citizenship by individual Jews in secular nation-states, the destruction of one-third of Jewry in the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel.

The Internet has been this miraculous conduit to the undeniable truth to the Holocaust.

Most of the Jewish refugees, stripped of their considerable possessions, came to Israel. They were welcomed by the Jewish state. They were given shelter and support, and they were integrated into Israeli society together with half a million survivors of the European Holocaust.

When somebody says that six million people died in the Holocaust, there is nobody in the world who can understand that. It’s only through story, reading books by Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi, that you really begin to understand the trauma and how horrible it actually was.

There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

There’s a lot going on in the world that’s very disturbing: rewriting the Holocaust; pseudo-historians rewriting history itself. And we’re dealing with a terrorist mentality that involves whole nations.

The risk of the Holocaust is not that it will be forgotten, but that it will be embalmed and surrounded by monuments and used to absolve all future sins.

Following the Second World War, we are a country of one ethnicity. After the moving of the borders, after the tragedy of the Holocaust and the murder of Polish Jews, we don’t have large minority groups.

One reason that I embarked on a study of Nazi doctors was that in this personal journey, I had the feeling increasingly that I did want to do a Holocaust study and that increasingly I wanted it to be of perpetrators, which I thought was more needed.

When you grow up Jewish, you are exposed at a very young age to the phenomenon of anti-Semitism and its extreme manifestation in the Holocaust. I spent a lot of time as a little kid wondering how something like that could happen.

I grew up in Brooklyn, and my parents were Holocaust survivors, so they never taught me anything about nature, but they taught me a lot about gratitude.

The Holocaust survivors are among the most inspiring people I have had the privilege to meet.

The Holocaust also shows us how a combination of events and attitudes can erode a society’s democratic values.

I became a co-chair of the Congressional Study Group from Germany several years ago with the expressed purpose of helping increase aid to Holocaust survivors.

Jewish Americans weren’t just integrated, like other ethnic and religious groups. They also attracted a particular sympathy and admiration, rooted in Holocaust remembrance, affection for Israel, and a distinctive pride in the scope of their success.

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century‘s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.

The need for reflection and restraint of power is what led Louis Freeh to order that all new agent classes visit the Holocaust Museum here in Washington so they could see and feel and hear in a palpable way the consequences of abuse of power on a massive, almost unimaginable scale.

Holocaust survivors came to Israel in order to establish a new human society where nobody would be able to hurt them just because they’re Jewish. This is both a furious and vulnerable message.

You can talk about Holocaust denial, but it’s really marginal for the most part. What is compelling about the Armenian genocide, is how it has been forgotten.

What I’m trying to say is the Holocaust was a horrific crime against humanity and frankly, I would never want to see that repeated.

In Italy, the country where fascism was born, we have a particular relation with the Holocaust, but as a turning point in history it belongs to everybody in the world. It is a part of humanity.

The radio even weren’t allowed to say there was a Holocaust and people were being killed right, left and center in these terrible camps.

During my first semester of college, I raised my hand in a class and asked the professor to define a word I didn’t know. The word was holocaust, and I had to ask because, until that moment, I had never heard of it.

It seems unavoidable that history will always link the reestablishment of the State of Israel with the tragedy of the Holocaust.

I grew up in a household with my mother, who was a Holocaust survivor. I very much understand the mentality that you cannot live in the past. You can’t spend your entire life, or even portions of it, looking back and dwelling on things that have already happened. You have to move forward.

Father God, we just ask You to open Your wide, wide arms and look down upon us, Lord, and lead us, and let us know what we should do to stop this, this terrible, terrible holocaust.

The United Nations was founded in the aftermath of World War II, just as the world was beginning to learn the full horrors of history’s worst genocide, the Holocaust that consumed 6 million Jews and 3 million others in Europe.

The Holocaust is as real a historical event as World War II itself and not to be challenged.

Abbas is on his way to becoming a professor of terrorism. After denying the Holocaust in his doctoral thesis, he now claims that Hamas is not a terrorist organization.

As freedom-loving people across the globe hope for an end to tyranny, we will never forget the enormous suffering of the Holocaust.

There is a lot of interest among the descendants of Holocaust victims in getting back artworks that were looted by the Nazis, for getting at least some form of compensation and closure for the horrors visited upon their families.

In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.

I went to Israel for two months in 1970 and worked on a kibbutz. It affected me on levels that I hadn’t anticipated, working on a daily basis with people who were actual survivors of the Holocaust.

It was commonplace to hear it said, after the Bosnian genocide kicked off in 1992 and the Rwandan genocide erupted in 1994 and the Darfur genocide began in 2003, that the ‘international community‘ had learned nothing since the Holocaust.

My original interest in the Nazi holocaust was personal. Both my father and mother were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. Apart from my parents, every family member on both sides was exterminated by the Nazis.

One of the truly horrible things about the Holocaust is that it doesn’t end in 1945. It keeps affecting our lives in the way we think, and it will affect the way our children see the world.

They had taken me to an exhibit called ‘Psychiatry: Industry of Death’ on Hollywood Boulevard, where a Scientologist told me psychiatrists set up the Holocaust. I feared I was being brain-washed. And then I lost it – big time.

Do I have to see movies and television about the English throne or the Holocaust every year? There are multiple multi-million dollar movies with the same backdrop. But our Holocaust – meaning Latino – aren’t ever told.

President Obama himself has attributed the legitimacy of the Jewish State not to its historic identity as Jewish territory, but to the Holocaust.

There is no way a non-Jew could say what I did in ‘The Holocaust Industry’ without being labelled a Holocaust denier. I am labelled a Holocaust denier, too.

I most sincerely wish that the world in which we live be free from the threat of a nuclear holocaust and from the ruinous arms race. It is my cherished desire that peace be not separated from freedom which is the right of every nation. This I desire and for this I pray.

My family kept its history to itself. On the plus side, I didn’t have to hear nightmarish stories about the Holocaust, the pogroms, terrible illnesses, painful deaths. My elderly parents never even spoke about their ailments.

I have a ton of Holocaust stuff, and some of it is really hard core.

We demand that people don’t deny the Holocaust, and we can’t ignore the tragedy of another nation.

The Holocaust’ was the most memorable experience filming because it was important and it wasn’t entertainment. It was history. It was unbearably real at times. You forgot it was a film.

Even with the best intentions, you can have a nuclear war, a nuclear holocaust, through miscalculation, through accidents.

God must have been on leave during the Holocaust.

Never to forget the Holocaust was not only against Jews. It was mostly against Jews but it was also against homosexuals, gypsies and, let’s not forget, people with disability.

Even post-WWII, nobody talked about the Holocaust. It wasn’t until the ’50s that people started talking about it.

I never experienced much outright anti-Semitism. While we learned about the Holocaust – endlessly, it felt like – no spray-painted swastika ever appeared on my childhood landscape. Jewish persecution was an ever-looming reality, but always an abstract one.

Indeed, the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense if not sheer fraud.

Throughout my work as a state legislator and member of Congress since 2002, I have worked as hard as I could to build bridges. I’ve worked to combat anti-Semitism and confront Holocaust denial. I’ve organized dozens of meetings to promote interfaith dialogue and joint projects.

Empires came and went while we, the Jewish people, persecuted relentlessly, facing expulsions and pogroms and the Holocaust, survived. We survived thanks to the Torah and faith in the Lord.

To see the faces and hear the voices of victims of the Holocaust – one of the darkest chapters in history – was an experience I will never forget.

We Brits print banknotes out in Debden in Essex, and have contracted it out to the private sector. Here in the U.S. it is a government operation right in the heart of Washington next door to the Holocaust Museum.

I am appalled by Le Pen’s anti-Semitic past and feelings. A man who says the Holocaust is no more than a footnote in history is beyond my comprehension.

The Iranian regime gives financial support to terrorist organizations all over the world, denies the Holocaust, and calls for the wiping the state of Israel from the map, while developing long-range missiles and trying to obtain nuclear weapon.

This is why I am a Zionist: because Diaspora leads to hatred and the Holocaust.

I’m obsessed with history, especially WWII and the Jews in Europe during the Holocaust.

I was born into an Irish Catholic family in the New York area in this great, wonderful, and safe country, but the Holocaust has always haunted me, and it has long stood as a stumbling block to faith. How could such a thing be? How is that consistent with the concept of a loving God?

We do a lot of shows for young people who have probably never been to the theater before and they are learning about the Holocaust, which unhappily, many of them do not know about.

Unlike the Holocaust, Stalin‘s murders are forgotten: dust blowing in the wind.

It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.

My novella, ‘The Lucky One,’ is inspired in part by my dad and also by a Holocaust survivor I interviewed for the Steven Spielberg Survivors of the Shoah Foundation.

Germany can make a major difference in the lives of so many Holocaust survivors who are struggling in their later years.

We cannot guarantee that a humanitarian catastrophe of the extent of the Holocaust will not happen again. On the contrary, we witness a catalogue of atrocities every day in wars across the globe.

The Holocaust story has been told and retold so many times.

The President of Iran has called for the destruction of Israel and the West and has even denied the holocaust took place. Iran and its terrorist arm Hezbollah are responsible for the current conflicts between Israel and Lebanon.

We must remember both the sacrifices and service of the Greatest Generation who secured freedom and prosperity for our world, as well as the horrors and lessons of the Holocaust.

Jewish immigration in the 20th century was fueled by the Holocaust, which destroyed most of the European Jewish community. The migration made the United States the home of the largest Jewish population in the world.